A genius sees ghosts—gravity, electricity, evolution—in this
book, mind. Now vivid. Now a hoax. He can pretend to be coarse and
not see them, but once glimpsed they'll return and demand
understanding.
When a difficult old phantom nears, Mr. Roberts doesn't step into
the fog: revel in the ambiguity of natural language, confuse the
issue with a splatter of conflicting official opinions, or mention
curious but irrelevant facts. This book starts where most turn.
Praise others only for writing a question mark after a word, not for
showing how to question, much less answer.
This
book doesn't hold another untested theory of mind. An idea's prized
if it made a blank machine more bright, swift, or elegant. An idea's
condemned if it made the machine dull, slow, or fat.
If Mr. Roberts would waste your time with unimportant words—not
requiring himself to think only what no one thought, write what no
one wrote—his book wouldn't be so lean. And there are already too
many books, Frankenstein books, made from older books, cut, shuffled,
and sewn again.
A social worker, psychologist, teacher—anyone whose universe
goes not an inch past humanity—would commit Isaac Newton for his
self-experiments. The hurried crowd doesn't want a second to think.
Given their use, they're likely right not to try. To them, genius
seems a disease, though they'd freeze in dark caves without it. The
brain values the liver; to the liver, the brain's a leech. They can't
see the threads that their comfort hangs from, not that they'd mind
its loss so long as who they feel to be their peers were trapped
there with them. But they will have the gifts of genius whether they
want them or not. This book is one.
Recent Comments